Choosing Your PDA
Choose your PDA according to personality, collaboration, and scheduling needs.
Today’s topic is choosing a PDA.
Listener Jerri calls in:
You have done a podcast on To Do but I was wondering if you would do one concerning personal planner/organizer use. Do you advise PDA or pen and paper? Any brands? What are your thoughts?
The quick and dirty tip is to base your choice on your personality type, your collaboration needs, and your scheduling timeframe.
Hi, Jerri! I have so many personal organizing tools I need a tool to organize them. I have a fanny pack for my Blackberry, iPod, headphones, 3×5 notpad, pen, and Palm Pilot. Pathetically, I actually wear the fanny pack. In public. It keeps me safe on the subway, along with my spandex bicycle shorts. Even Boston muggers have enough fashion sense to rescue their reputations by keeping their distance.
Choose a system that works for you
The world has two kinds of people: the structured (also known as uptight anal-retentive obsessive-compulsives), and the chill (also known as “saxaphone players”). I’m an uptight obsessive-compulsive who really wants to chill out.
In my experience, the chill are genetically incapable of keeping a detailed system, but they do benefit from having one place for everything. Chill folk need one place to stuff notes, calendars, to-do lists, and addresses where they can dig them out on demand.
We uptight like flexible systems we can design to match our thinking. It can have several pieces and since we’re good at details, we keep track of all six critical pieces as we rush from the cab to yet another I’m-five-minutes-early-where-is-everyone-else meeting.
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Paper vs. Plastic: There’s no Right Answer
Should your system be paper or electronic? I want to say, electronic! It’s the 21st century! We don’t have hovercrafts, yet, but it is the space age. We should use space-age gadgets.
Yeah, right. Electronic systems are great, until they crash or screw up synchronization. Then you waste days trying to recover your data.
Paper lets you doodle and draw, use colors, annotate, and scribble in the margins (wistful sigh). And paper’s more considerate. It’s rude asking someone to wait while you spend five minutes typing their number into your device when it would take three seconds on paper. (In fact, that’s why you’re still single. Slipping someone your phone# on a cocktail napkin? SEXY! Punching it into your PDA and trying to beam it to your love interest? Loser!)
Where electronic systems rock is for collaboration. If your assistant keeps your schedule or shares your address book, or if your company uses an online calendar so your friendly co-workers can commit you to meetings without your knowledge or permission, get a PDA that synchronizes with your system. Exactly which PDA to use depends on your calendaring software, the operating system you use, and your intestinal fortitude in configuring the whole darned mess.
Time Frame Matters
My PDA shows me a day at a time. “Stever, want to come to a late-night cocktail party and literary society meeting? Doors open at 11 p.m.” Of course, I said yes. If my PDA could show a week at a glance, I would have seen the 7 a.m. board meeting the next day. It’s nice to show up with a nice presentation. It’s less nice when you hand out the marketing plan and instead, it’s the 3 a.m. drunken bar song you wrote about how stupid your boss’s tie is. Awkward!
I need week-at-a-glance and month-at-a-glance to avoid embarrassing schedule collisions. That time, I was lucky, but some parties require more cleanup, and it takes several days for the bandages to come off.
Here’s My Current Setup
I’m a details guy, so moving parts are fine, but I actually hate fanny packs. So despite their protective abilities, I use a one-device solution. In my dreams, the device is a beautiful notebook and fountain pen, with a month-at-a-glance calendar. But… my assistant needs calendar access, so I’ve gone high-tech with a Blackberry. It syncs to my address book, calendar, and notepad. My to-do list stays on paper, so I keep it short.
I still love my paper. For meetings, I bring a notebook to record notes, action items, and appointments, with arrows and boxes and little smiley faces. And hearts. (Don’t you just love hearts?) I print my calendar month-at-a-glance so I can schedule, keeping my life in balance. Later, back in the office, I type in the relevant bits.
Even reference notes go into the Notepad program (and thus the Blackberry), so they’re available whenever I need them. That way, I can even work lying on my stomach as they laser off that tattoo that seemed like such a good idea after the fifth Tequila shot.
My paper of choice is from Levenger, which sells wonderfully thick, smooth paper that actually feels good to write on.
As much as I love smooth-flowing ink, roller ball pens blotch up when I use them (it happens with lefties. We push the pen across the paper instead of pulling it, and it makes a difference). Instead, I use a Pilot G-2 05 gel-based pen or a Pentel Hybrid Gel. I buy them in boxes of 12 and hide them everywhere so a pen is never far. For a mechanical pencil, I use the 0.5mm Pilot Shaker, which advanced the lead with a shake, and the shaker mechanism gives it a nice heft.
For creating your own setup, do you need one place for everything or are you comfy with many devices? Collaboration need tell you paper or electronic, and your scheduling timeframe drives the calendar format. Then go wild in your favorite supply store, frolicking amongst the paper planners and electronic goodies until you find the one that’s best for you.
Just remember: before you purchase, do your homework, and please, wait for those Tequila shots to wear off.
This is Stever Robbins. Send questions about how to Work Less and Do More to getitdone@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email .
For information about keynote speeches, workshops, or other appearances, visit SteverRobbins.com for details.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
Man with Tablet image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
